Total Pageviews

Friday, 28 April 2017

Alexandre Costa-Leite and I have been postulating a universal metaphysics that go hand in hand in the path open by universal logic. Such metaphysics doesn't stop anywhere short of the logically impossible for it is not tied to a logical system in particular. Rather, it considers all the different logics in order to take modal (and post-modal) notions such as necessity, causation and ground as indexed to a particular galaxy (a set of possible world corresponding to a logic). To be clear, universal metaphysics can take several forms; let's consider four:a) It can take the form of a refusal of the great picture, and so there are no metaphysical conclusions that could encompass all galaxies at once. One could have metaphysical claims about each galaxy, but only in a contrastive manner and so the each-all inference would not hold - having metaphysical claims about each galaxy entails nothing concerning all the galaxies. b) It can take the form of assuming one specific logic - say, the classical one - and consider that there are relevant arguments, maybe based on entrenchment, that would make this logic better than any other and the one to be preferred for a non-neutral but yet absolute and coherent set of metaphysical claims.c) It can assume that metaphysical claims can be made about all galaxies and pay the price of contradiction - universal metaphysics would be incoherent, paradoxical; in this view, something consistent could be said about each specific galaxy, but nothing consistent could be said about all galaxies but still something paraconsistent could be said about all galaxies and we assume that contradictions don't undermine determinations.d) It can simply deny the possibility of any metaphysics and derive an anti-metaphysical argument from the plurality of galaxies along the following lines: once logic is crucial for any metaphysical claim (because, for instance, one needs the space of possible worlds defined) and once there are many logics, then there is no ground for any metaphysical claim whatsoever. Universal metaphysics then become no metaphysics.

I used to understand these alternatives in terms akin to those presented by Kit Fine in his "Tense and Reality". There he primarily considers the relation between perspectives and reality as it appears in the problem of time in McTaggart. Fine considers four possibilities: the denial of the existence of time (which would be akin to alternative d), the denial that reality is absolute to claim that it is scattered, dependent on perspectives and encompassing no totality, what he calls perspectivism (akin to a), the denial that reality is neutral by assuming a presentist approach to tense according to which only what is now the case exists (akin to b) and the denial that reality is coherent and the assumption of what he calls fragmentalism where there are fragments of consistent reality that add up to a non-consitent über-reality (this is akin to c). The adoption of a universal metaphysics of the type c would involve the paradoxical conclusion that there are inconsitencies - or contradictions - in the world. Here, of course, one can just bite the bullet and say that we find contradictions because there they are.

Jon Cogburn, based on the work of Priest and Livingston, have developed the idea of a paradoxo-metaphysics. He presents it in his well-crafted Garcian Meditations with respect to the metaphysics espoused by Tristan Garcia. The general idea can be introduced considering a metaphysics that would entail that metaphysics is impossible - the task of metaphysics then could be constructed as that of giving a maximally general account of what reality is like such that metaphysics is impossible. The consequence could be to drop the ladder after climbing through it. But one could refuse such a move and this is indeed the gesture Priest does with respect to paradoxes such as Russell's: he embraces the paradoxical situation that a Russell set is both a member and not a member of the universe of sets. He then posits contradictions in the world (dialetheas). This is a first case of paradoxico-metaphysics. Cogburn goes on to show how this works in Garcia's metaphysics: Garcia embraces an allism, in Lewis terms, according to which everything is – it is sufficient to be determined, or to have a property, to be something. Now, the world most surely has properties and is determined, but it is not distinctively something. As Garcia holds that a contradictory determination is still a bona fide determination (a white and non-white surface is still determined because it cannot be a only-white surface, say), Cogburn feels inclined to ascribe him with a version of paradoxico-metaphysics. And he contrasts this position with that of Marcus Gabriel who denies the existence of the world - acting as if an alternative akin to a would be a best bet. Garcia, he argues, would rather go for a full-blooded paradoxical position akin to fragmentalism and to c.

Now, paradoxico-metaphysics opens a horizon for universal metaphysics. Cogburn puts it in terms of Priest's analysis of Russell's paradox according to which the main steps are Existence (or Being), Transcendence and Closure. The acceptance of the three premisses would entail a contradiction and, if the contradiction (i.e. the paradox) is welcomed, would entail a position akin to fragmentalism or c. Those are the full-blown paradoxico-metaphysical doctrines. Further, if Existence is denied to avoid the paradox, one is back to a position like a; one can also deny Transcendence to avoid contradiction and then argue for a position like b or deny Closure to also avoid contradiction and end up close to d. So it seems like Fine's categories more or less map into Priest's. And further his option for fragmentalism also goes in the direction of paradoxico-metaphysics.

But a number of questions concerning universal metaphysics remain. The most pressing ones relate to the way one is to go about, say, paradoxico-metaphysics. How should one count, relate or otherwise individuate contradictions? The common way to proceed is the same as in universal logic: to use a classical meta-logic. Could paradoxico-metaphysics provide an alternative to classical metametaphysics?

Thursday, 27 April 2017

Discussing Heidegger's Einblick in das was ist I considered monadologies - are they symptoms of the age of danger thinking through co-existence? I had in mind the kind of thinging thing that the Other is. Ge-Stell requires the conscription of the Other, the neutralization of the Other into a Gegen-stand, ie. a transformation of the Other in an exteriority exposed in principle, part of a world that can be in view as unveiled, as unguarded, as incapable of concealment. Now, there is a sense in which monadologies are attempts to bring in co-existence, the Other, into the picture challenging the idea of a world that can be in view. Having Being Up For Grabs in mind, I would say that also an ontology of doubts that addresses insufficient reason and a rhythm-oriented ontology that stresses the transduction lines between those seen and those that behold attempt to build metaphysics of the non-conscripted, away from the predicaments of the age of danger as they introduce what is up for grabs, what is offered as such to metaphysics. Monadologies, in particular, endeavor to bring the Other as a capacity to alter the world, the Other becomes capable of othering (the other othering is maybe a case of the thing thinging). However the world in view featured by Ge-Stell in the age of danger is in most monadologies rather multiplied than dissolved as the Other becomes at least one of the three:
a) away from the present time (that happens in Leibniz where the interaction with any other pre-exists the time of perception and action);
b) an image of the ready for conscription in the form of "I unveil the other because she is similar to me" and therefore faced ontologically as the reduction of the other to a same – the alter-ego, the other of the same (this happens in Husserl's monadology, but arguably also in Tarde's and Whitehead's) or
c) the other-for-me, the other in the agent's agenda and therefore ready for my perusal (this I suspect happens in Whitehead's and in Latour's monadologies).

Today I presented here at the LSU my reading of the Einblick, guided by my attempt to build a (non-ontologist) metaphysics of the other and by my interest in perception - in the ethics of perception and in perceiving as a concern with what nears and shows. Below is the handout I distributed. I organized the presentation around several key oppositions in the text that interest me, most involving Ge-Stell and the idea of objects ready to be conscripted.

Handout

Nähe/Ge-Stell: The setting apart of all distances brings no nearness: nearness is not short distance. Nähe is not about distance, it's about a presence that is not forced, it's about not placing something in a map, but approach it where it makes itself present. In contrast, Ge-Stell is a self-gathered collection of positionings that works like a device that produces objects exposed, mapped, available, in standing reserve. The issue is about placing, presentating and presencing. Nearing is the essence of nearness – approaching.

Thing/object: The object is what is exposed, what stands against a viewpoint that makes it visible. The thing, in contrast, does its own thing, it approaches and reveals itself at its own accord: the thing things (Nähe). When Plato thinks of the jug as an idea appearing to the producer, he is not engaging with the thing but positioning its appearance. What makes a jug be a jug is the empty that it holds, what makes the jug jug, the thing thing. A jug holds and awaits to offer. The empty prefigures the gift: holding and outpouring. When its essences atrophies, pouring becomes just pouring in and out. In the gift of the pour, earth and skies, divinities and mortals abide, “they belong together”, the Geviert. A thing is what gathers – brings together what is scattered. This gathering is not a gathering of positions in a point (it's no topography). Rather, it is engaging with what is gathered from nearness – a gathering to bring together different forces or urges, an articulation, a negotiation (business). The thing concernfully approaches, its presencing is not a position in a topography. The thing things: gathering is always an act; thing is the meeting place and not the abbreviation for its relations and its positions. The essence of nearness – approaching (with concern). A thing offers itself, an object is exposed, presented (that is, made present), given. Ge-Stell transforms things in objects; it makes them presence as what is ordered to be present. (Kant's things in themselves are objects that are not objects for anyone, they are already understood as being there, as composing a landscape that can be viewed – even if no possible experience can attain them.)

Guarding/exposing: Things don't come through machinations of the humans, but they also don't come without the vigilance of the mortals (humans). Things need vigilance for they are gatherings, offerings, approaches and they reveal and conceal.Vigilance is not unconcealing, it is not making things present. Vigilance requires commemorative thinking, it also requires letting things concealed. Care/security, Invigilating/spying. Perception: to exercise nearness (to engage) or to take in what is revealed (to expose). We place, set things in a position and therefore we make possible their requisitioning; positioning, exposing what is available. Ge-Stell is a conscription (die Gestellung): place what is available in standing reserve. Tending the fields as being watchful of what the discretion of the growing forces in the crops contrasts with farming the land. Ge-Stell replaces gathering with conscription – an order that is orderable. Ge-Stell is the essence of technology (science is an application of the essence of technology). Ge-Stell doesn't guard the thing as thing. Ge-Stell let things unguarded, away from their truth – not protected (un-veiled). Wahrnis-Wahrheit: Das Ge-Stell läßt in seinem Stellen das Ding ohne die Hut — ohne die Wahr seines Dingwesens. Things are in greater and greater neglect – to guard is not to expose.

World/Ge-Stell: In the unguarding of the thing, there takes place the refusal of the world: there is no world of things that refer to the Geviert of God/Sky/Earth/Mortals but only a reservoir of what is available in standing reserve. World guards the being of being. But it is proper of the world to refuse itself as a world – it is not offered as a world, as a guardian of being. It guards but leaving it unguarded – concealed, not exposed. World and Ge-Stell are the same, but the same is never equivalent. World and Ge-Stell are set against one another. World that worlds contrasts with the world in view, the latter is a step towards the disclosure and unveiling which is proper of Ge-Stell. The essence of Ge-Stell is danger; danger that is associated with pursuit (Nach-stellen, fara, gefahr). Pursuit requires things that can be found, the world ready to be viewed, perception as disclosure. Things are placed in a landscape in view, the Great Outdoors that rest unguarded.

Alethea/the world in view: World withdraws in concealment. There ought to be lethe for alethea, alethea doesn't displace lethe, but rather welcomes it for without lethe alethea cannot guard. Unconcealment is about presencing – alethea relies on concealment (physis kriptestai philei). So, lethe is the essential source and essential provenance of every way of being. Ge-Stell ousts being from its truth.

Physis/thesis: There is thesis to physis – physis is bringing-here-forth, it is the opening of something closed from itself: that is to say, letting something presence of its own accord. Showing. Thesis arrange a presence in a position, this is what humans do to the presencing of physis. Then a stone presenced by physis is arregimented into a staircase and its steps by thesis. Here we see how thesis disguises itself trying to present things as if they presence in the thesis way, and not in the physis way. As if they were in view, exposed, out there always. Physis gives unconcealment to human representation and place it at their disposal. An offer – this is representable, not yet represented. When things are represented, they become placed to be viewed, no longer offerings but in standing reserve for the sensorial devices to grasp. Ge-Stell is a dispensation of being (Seinsgeschickes) where to be is to be placed, to be set, to be a position in a (thethic) topology. The world becomes a landscape of points, and being exposed and never interrupted.

Mortal/Ge-Stell: The thing gathers and is offered to the human who exercises an essence (a thing that things) while Ge-Stell places objects in front of the human. The human is conscripted by Ge-Stell. “The human has offered himself for the carrying out of this conscripting. He stands in line to take over such requisitioning and to complete it. The human is thereby an employee of requisitioning.”(22, AM). Requisitioning assaults the destiny of the human as it does with gods: a theology based on atomic physics would makes gods orderable. The essence of the human is not decided by humans in their own terms and Ge-Stell sneaks through it. It is not up to the human to fight it, but the human can pave the way or precipitate the turn towards a different dispensation of beyng. The human can collaborate in the turn (not predictable because it involves another Seinsgeschickes) by replacing exposing by guarding, by being tuned to concealment through forgetting. Forgetting is guarding. The salvation lies in guarding, in the world worlding for the world is the forgetful guard of things. Ge-Stell disguises the thing and also the unthinging of things, like forgetting forgets the very act of forgetting. It presents things as if the world is itself always in view, ready to be seen, spotted. It is necessary to let being escape from this pursuit, we need to forget how we let it escape. The sudden salvation from danger comes in protecting forgetfulness.

Glancing/the world in view: Forgetfulness is close to seeing things in a glance – a glance leaves the concealed unilluminated. It is like the light of the Pasolini's firefly. The Blick is an Einblick. The insight is an insight, not a permanent light as not even God could have insights about the world without essencing in the worlding of the world that involves concealment (compare with Wittgenstein's “not even God could know anything mathematical without doing mathematics” PU 352, RFM; mathematical objects are not placed in a position where they are in view by someone, attaining them requires some sort of careful approach that understands that under a different angle they will disappear from one's view, they will be concealed) A world in view (a world of objects, maybe in themselves) is a world that can be viewed by someone else, by God. Glancing is engaging in the thinging of things, in their approaching, in their showing, as opposed to a contemplation of a landscape where objects are set.

Friday, 21 April 2017

Reading Heidegger's Bremen lectures with an eye on the possible blind spots of the compelling contrast between nearness and positionality (Nähe and Ge-Stell). It occurs to me a grand hypothesis concerning the metaphysics of the other: the epoch of Ge-Stell, the epoch where being is pursued and therefore is in danger started with forgetting the specific strand of parricide that Plato's Strangers promotes and favors in the Sophist. His picture is one where five categories ground at the same plane and are intertwined: rest, change, being, same and other. Not-being comes from the friction between being and other. It is not nihilism in the Severino sense itself, but a branch of nihilism that forgot the role of the Stranger in the parricide – the Stranger creates a new kind of opposition, different from that of Parmenides, the opposition that is not an object standing against but a thing that, while approaching concernfully, interrupts. Interruption is not a negation in the sense of nothingness, but it is the opposite of being. This epoch makes us see the others as disclosing themselves to us, as objects of disclosure. Being becomes being viewed (or being spied) and no longer interrupted by the other that requires a response. The offer becomes no more than something at my disposal, nothing that commits me or appeals to me. The move towards this epoch in the history of being is an economic move, in the sense of a general economy: one is never even with the other when perception takes place. The other appears as a given in the sense that there is an ingratitude required. The epoch of persecution is also an epoch of ingratitude.

Sophist 258: “We have shown what form of being non-being is, for we have shown that the nature of the other is, and is distributed over all things in their relation to one another, and whatever part of another that is contrasted with being, this is precisely what we have ventured to call non-being” and right below: “[…] and that being, and difference or other, traverse all things and mutually interpenetrate, so that the other partakes of being, and by reasons of this participation is, and yet is not that of which it partakes, but other, and being other than being, it is clearly a necessity that non-being should be”. This is prepared through from 253. The parricide promoted by Plato is not that of flooding being with non-being but rather to understand non-being as a consequence of a friction between being and the other – the other being primary to non-being and at the same level as being. Plato's stranger-led metaphysics has ontology in a pair with dynamics, statics, alterology and the study of sameness as its constitutive parts. The other, and not non-being, is at the basis. The image of the parricide is that of a being flooded with other, broken, fragmented and with cracks. Negation comes from these cracks, and not the other way round. An ontologist rebuttal (to use the term of Levinas) based on an ontologist forgetting of the terms of the Stranger's parricide would rather have that everything sprouts from being and therefore ontology is prior – and metaphysics becomes a coherent, absolute, neutral discourse with no blemishes and no rifts. Ontologist metaphysics is smooth, is frictionless, is like a landscape to be portrayed.

NB: Heidegger, S&Z 7C: “Because phenomenon, as understood phenomenologically, are never anything but what goes to make up Being, while Being is in every case the Being of some entity, we must first bring forward the entities themselves if it is our aim that Being should be laid bare […] phenomenology is the science of the Being of entities – ontology”. This is an ontologist conception of phenomenon (and of phenomenology).

Wednesday, 12 April 2017

Is there a metaphysical picture of the accident, the casual, the contingent? Metaphysics is often constructed as about necessities – necessary connections, necessary principles, necessary properties.
*Does a metaphysics of contingency make it necessary?

Metaphysics and contingency – the friction:
1. (Aristotle) Metaphysics aims at finding necessities (necessary relations) in what is concrete. Metaphysical knowledge is knowledge of the necessary (and the permanent).
2. (Heraclitus/Plato/Hume) There are (or could be) no necessary connections (and maybe no necessary properties) in what is concrete. If it is so, metaphysics cannot focus on the concrete.
A conclusion: (Kant) Metaphysics should look for necessary connections (and necessary properties) somewhere else (for example in transcendental norms, or in semantical rules).
Another conclusion: Metaphysics should carry on looking at the concrete and abandon the focus on necessary connections.
Problem: Can the non-necessary be known (or assessed, or understood).
Scheme of an answer: maybe contingency is accessed through its contrast with necessity; maybe only if everything is equally contingent nothing can be known.

The metaphysics of contingency: the Meillassoux approach
Contingency transcends the concrete, it is its very principle.
The principle of facticity is necessary.
The concrete cannot make anything contingent or non-contingent: it has no power or agency to change the facticity of all things (not even God, as a possible being acting on the concrete could).
There is no immanent alteration that can change how things are; contingency is decided outside the concrete – like Platonic necessity.

The metaphysics of contingency: the BUG (Being Up for Grabs) approach
Contingency is immanent, not determined once and for all.
It is related to the other, to the possibility of the other (another agent affecting what's taking place, another course of events, another interfering pattern).
Contingency follows from the possible (immanent) alteration of all things – things being up for grabs.
Still there are necessary things among the concrete:
Symbebeka prota ton onton – an Aristotelian approach. Contingency as the plural of necessities.

Two senses of contingency:
Contingency (as opposed to necessary) – Leibniz's determination without necessity
Contingency (as opposed to determinate) – Meillassoux's facticity as opposed to determination
In Being up for grabs: contingency and indetermination.

Two contingentisms:
Kristie Miller's contingentism: some metaphysical theses are not necessary.
Tim Williamson's contingentism: necessitism (the thesis that everything is necessarily something) is false.
BUG is not committed to any of these two thesis (but its project relates to both).

Three modes of alteration – three ontoscopies:
1. A monadology of fragments:
Leibniz: a doctrine of deterministic contingency.
The general basic features of monadologies:
0. No ultimate entity is like any other;
1. The ontological principle: no entities, no reason;
2. Flat ontology;
3. Everything perceives (esse est percipi AND percipere);
4. No substrata;
5. No vacuous actuality;
Other features: priority nihilism, contingentism, anti-haecceitism…
A monadology of fragments: actual entities exist in three modes of existence, fragments, compositions, composers.

2. An ontology of doubts
Insufficient reason: the principle of indeterminacy vs the principle of facticity.
How to know an indetermination? By doubt?
Ontologies of doubt – doubts require determination.
Pyrrhonism vs Sextus: how to suspend the judgment about determinations

3. Rhythm-oriented ontology
Repetition and the eyes of the beholder.
Contagion and the influence of an event on its neighborhood.
Event-ontology: Carol Cleland's change of a state in a determinable property.
Events as beats: time and timing.

Coda: possible worlds in different galaxies associated to many logical systems.

Being up for grabs and alteration: the co-existence of rhythms, the insufficiency of reason, the plurality of agents. Contingency is a consequence of plurality – it is the outcome of the inevitability of pluralism brought about by genuine otherness. (An attempt at a metaphysics of contingency that doesn't make it collapse into necessity.)

Agency, co-existence and the future of monadology

Hand Out

The ground and the other: from the indetermination (or underdetermination or anomy) to self-determination (or autonomy, or spontaneity, or sovereignty) to ask a question that could be phrased as: how is it like to be a ground (or one's own ground).

Grounding as agency: a ground is a genuine agency – a command and a commencement. An agency-oriented metaphysics is one where agency plays an important role among what exists. It addresses issues concerning the co-existence of agencies (or their plurality).

Agency and intentionality: I take intentionality to be neither necessary nor sufficient for agency. Rather, agency is the understood as providing a determination while not fully subject to another (hetero-)determination (or not fully grounded grounding).

Metaphysics and social sciences: If there is a single agency, an agency-oriented metaphysics draws from the vicinities of theology but if there are more than one agency, it draws inspiration from the social science: how do agencies relate, how they associate, how they dispute territories. In both cases, why-questions are often translated into who-questions.

The (human) social science of agency (the anthropology of agency):
1. There is no agency among humans: everything is determined neurologically or psychologically (or by Gods) or rather the human is a domain of indeterminacies where chaos reigns. Humans are either random beings or programmed robots.
2. There is agency among humans but no (human) agent: agency is not to be found in human individuals but rather in the forces, powers and disciplines that shape them. Foucault: the individual is the product of power. Examples of (social, human) agencies: class, race, gender pressures or the strengths of capital (or the economy).
3. There are agents but they are constitutively interdependent: agents cannot be individuated or identified without an appeal to the (human) social collectives and, ultimately, to other individuals on which they depend.
4. There are independent agents: there is no society prior to individuals, every social connection is created and maintained through independent agents that exercise their identity in a social milieu. Social institutions are to be understood in (methodological) individualist terms.
5. There is no anthropology and no room for any (human) social science: the agents are others who cannot be modeled, explained or predicted. The other agents are, nevertheless, an important source of agency. The presence of other agents provide (at least a degree of) heterodetermination.

The five positions: from anthropology to ontology
1. No agency or no agency in the world (agency is transcendent). Everything is contingent or anomic, Heraclitus; the source of anomy is transcendent (Meillassoux), the ground of everything is transcendent (Plato).
2. Individual agents are grounded on individualizing agencies. Simondon's processes of individuation, Karen Barad's intra-actions and agential realism, a reading of Deleuze's double articulation.
3. Agents are interdependent. Monadologies.
4. Agents are already individualized and independent. Object-oriented ontologies like Harman's, where objects are understood as having a substratum independent of their relations and qualities.
5. Agents without ontology. An agents is an other that can, as an agent, affect me. Yet, each individual agent cannot be less than a ground in themselves. Derrida's infinite responsibility read as an extension of Levinas' claim that I am the locus of response.

The five positions: the pressures on 3

The pressure of 1 is that of an anonymous or non-existent ground – a grounder-poor metaphysics. The pressure of 5 is that of the other as other – the upheavals of metaphysics in an agent-rich environment. The pressure of 2 is that of agencies over the individuation of individual agents. The pressure of 4 is that of the independence and self-contained character of an agent.

The idea of a monadology (3): basic and derivative features

These features are extracted from Leibniz's monadology and shared with (at least several) neo-monadologies (those of Gabriel Tarde, of Bruno Latour and of Alfred Whitehead).
B-0. Monads are ultimate and distinct: They are units of action and ultimate reality while each is distinct from all the others.
B-1. Principle of monadological ontology: Nothing comes to existence or remains in it without the concourse of monads.
B-2. Flat ontology: While there are important distinctions between the different types of monads, there is no over-arching ontological hierarchy among them.
B-3. No substrata: The indiscernibles are identical. A monad is what it is due to its qualities and relations (and in function of its states and the events it takes part).
B-4. All monads perceive: All unit of action is also a unit of perception. Perception is a guide to the interaction between the monads.
B-5. No vacuous actualities: Nothing exists without affecting other existing things and being affected by them.
D-1. Compossibility: No monad is necessary or possible in themselves. Modal notions are relative to what else is in place.
D-2. Contingentism: Not necessarily everything is something. In terms of possible worlds, monads are worldly beings that exist in no other possible worlds.
D-3. Priority nihilism: Neither the whole is ontologically prior to its parts nor the parts are ontologically prior to the whole.
D-4 Immaterialism: Monads are like governments that have respective jurisdictions and pure matter (if conceivable) can only be in one or more jurisdictions.

Five monadologies:
1. A monadology for design (Late Leibniz): Designing the world is designing different and infinitely many agents that are substances (persist in time) but have no substrata. Each monad has a territory associated to it – a jurisdiction – and are related to all the other through its interiority that is composed by a perspective on the external world. Monads are tied by compossibility links and yet a world cannot be made but by delegating events and states to units of agency.
2. A monadology of association (Tarde): Monads are substances that exist while they bring a difference to the society and the society of societies they associate. Monads are units of infinitesimal difference. Units of agency are the sole responsible for any animation in the world and are taken to be pure spirits of different natures. But they do associate contingently to other monads and something emerges from these (heterogeneous or homogeneous) societies of agents.
3. A monadology of actual entities (Whitehead): Actual entities are not substances and are in a constant becoming of other actual entities – yet, they are ultimate realities that enjoy a solidarity between themselves (a co-dependence). They compose what there is by their acts of experiencing (perceiving, prehending) which has, as one of its modes, that of efficient causation.
4. A monadology of networks (Latour 1984): Monads (or actants) can only be distinguished from networks in the context of tests of force – where the strength of unity for resistance is challenged. The monads are the ultimate non-substantial actualities but they cannot be counted independently of their associations – nothing is in itself reducible or irreducible to anything else .
5. A monadology of fragments (BUG): Monads exist in three different modes, as fragments, as composers, as compositions. They don't have substrata but in two of these modes (as fragments and as compositions) they are inert and they subsist if their composition is altered. Each monad is a fragment for composition and a composes by perceiving according to its perspective.

Different monadologies: Leibniz vs process neo-monadologies
Where lies the difference? Deleuze: closure vs capture; pre-established vs post-established harmony; design vs chance.
Leibniz's three times: Leibniz understands the co-existence between his monads as shaped by three distinct times:
1) The time of contemplation: The different infinite possible worlds are presented to God. It is the time of the architecture of the Palas palace, where each room is a possible world. To be sure, the first time took no time at all, as God requires no time to accomplish mathematical operations (concerning compossibility) and involves only analytical truths.
2) The time of choice: Then, God dealt not in necessities, but freely and wisely chose between the different possible worlds that had been contemplated. The choice was global and every element in the each world (including the prayers) somehow contributed to the overall (contingent) choice of a possible world once and for all.
3) The present time: The determined history of actions is made actual as the chosen world is put to run. The compossibility between monads (and events, states, qualities and relations) and the choice of a set of them has been already made.
Process neo-monadologies: the three times collapse into the present time.

Time and agency: If there is no time prior to present time interactions, everything takes place at the same time – and every monad's time interacts with each other. In this dense present time, the others are effective constituents of the action of each agent: each agent act by affecting the others and overall time is always a result of a plurality of agencies.

Today I was talking to Jon Cogburn about perception and the metaphysics of what is perceived and it became a bit clearer what is at stake in an agent-based metaphysics (of perception) in contrast to an Other-oriented metaphysics. In perception, an agent-oriented approach will attempt to understand what is perceived as an agent and as such as an alter-ego, filled with the agency and the autonomy I allegedly entertain. As such, the perceived can resist my attempts to understand it and it is viewed only to the amount it shows (or to the amount a negotiation between agents can achieve). In contrast, an Other-oriented approach has no assumption about the perceived other that it offers something and that it demands justice. The perceived tears totality apart. Here there is no model of the perceived: the Other is not an agent, not saddled with autonomy, not capable to resist. The Other is something other that demands justice for whatever is in offer. An impossible justice, as there are many others on offer. Still, a justice.

To say that the perception doesn't have a content is to say that it doesn't matter? This is where the metaphysical question comes in: it is made of offerings, of a plea for justice. To make justice to experience is to avoid saying it has a definite content (of any kind, conceptual, conceptualizable or whatever) while not saying it demands no response, or that it is isolated (or isolatable) from any articulation. In other words, experience has an impact on us as an interruption, as an offering – it is in fact this impact itself. (Maybe something akin to Quinean “something wrong in the kingdom of Denmark”, an impact on a web of beliefs; but in fact an offering or an interruption is not compulsory in itself as the other comes like an offer. When there is a setting for an experimentum crucis, and a result is being awaited, we can say that the doors are open. A recalcitrant experimental result is often left outside in the cold if it was not being expected, awaited, ready to be accepted. Here, however, the Other is constrained to give an already shaped answer, normally yes or no.) It is an impact in the sense of a knock on the door.

I thought this has to do with post-parricide ontology: the five genres of Plato:
1. rest,
2.movement,
3.being,
4.the same and
5. the other.
They are connected and intersect. Nothingness can be understood in terms of the other but being is in an intersecting pentagon with all the other four poles (that could inspire respectively 1. variations of necessitarianism or of a world with no agency or no immanent agency, 2. dynamism or a world full of agencies, 3. ontologism or the idea that agency in hypostasis form agents, 4. the idea of every being as an alter-ego independent and 5. the idea that the Other plagues and dazzles all being). In any case, the Other is what introduces alteration into being, rest and movement. It works as an offer, it is not bare being.

Sunday, 9 April 2017

Reading an interview answer of Levinas about Buber where he talks about asymmetry as the main feature that distinguishes him from Buber. He comments on a text by Buber about Samuel, Agag, Saul and the Amalekites. Buber stresses that he always thought Samuel must have understood God's message wrongly - the order could not have been to wipe out the Amalekites in punishment and what God was asking from Saul was something else than murdering every one in a town as punishment. The bible (Samuel 15) has that Saul went down to the town and destroyed the weak and useless but kept what was good and also took the king Agag as a prize. Buber prefers to believe God would never ask anyone to do that - to complete their deliverance from evil by doing further evil. Levinas claims that Buber was clearly not thinking of Auschwitz. In fact, he seems right as far as the biblical text is concerned - Saul regrets his sin of disobedience and Samuel states to Agag, before killing him, that he deserves not to be spared and that nothing from that town could be taken for holocaust. It seems like punishment was prescribed. But Buber has an important point here: the idea that God cannot really order punishment. This is not to say that one cannot punish, we punish for many different reasons, but that cannot be a divine (i.e. perfect, morally commendable or right) commandment. I take Buber's insight to be that God's intelligence, wisdom or justice would go beyond what that deals in punishment.

In Kant the other is only considered in terms of her autonomy, as sharing something with me. Kant's ethics is perhaps the origin of the idea of an alter-ego - the other me who is the subject of his ethics. Further, perhaps it is the very starting point of a general idea of ego, an ego that can be generalized like in the categorical imperative: don't do to other what I don't want done to me – and not don't do to others what they don't want to be done to them. Hence, it is moral to tell the truth to the murderer and enable him to kill because enabling someone to so something is an empirical consideration alien to moral issues. In other words, it is up to the murderer to be a moral agent. I should threat all the others in the same manner – the other is universal, they are universal mes. They are never other – I don't deal with the murderer as an other, not even as a murderer for that matter, but only as an autonomous moral agent like me.

No Borders Metaphysics

This is my blog revolving around the idea of arché as both command and origin, commencement and authority, foundation and of government and ancestrality. I often discusses issues to do with agency, contingency, hospitality as much as other issues in philosophy. Its url is named after a group in Brasilia that meets regularly to discuss issues to do with the interfaces between ontology and politics. It started out in a dialogue with the renewed interest in metaphysics and metametaphysics both by speculative philosophers and by analytical metaphysicians. In its first year, it discussed my ideas in connection to those of Harman, Kripke, Meillassoux, Brassier, Kit Fine, Viveiros de Castro, Reid-Bowen, Hamilton Grant, Latour, Schaffer, Bohn, Mumford, Horgan as well as Meinong, Heraklitus, McTaggart, Souriau, Deleuze, Guattari, Haraway, Molnar and Heidegger. More recently, in 2015-2016, the authors brought in include also Levinas, Derrida, Whitehead, Kant, Pritchard, Locke, Plato, Shaviro and Sosa.